The good and the bad...

It seems by the time I sit down to write so much has happened that it's impossible to cover it all in one blog. While we had a great vacation weekend for Kai's birthday we also came home to a pretty bad situation that is yet to be resolved. In the midst of the of the good and the bad it seems a million other crazy things happen as well such as purchasing a working bull and cart today, falling a 100 ft. tree from the roots with machete's and 2 hoes, having a hen take to laying fresh eggs on our beds each morning :)), setting a new record for 32 people in our 14 maximum person matatu, and meeting a 10 year old girl missing 1/4 of a toe bleeding all over the dirt, all by herself, with no shoes and waiting for a matatu to take her to the Dr. Amongst all this I had the amazing opportunity to sit, mostly in tears by candlelight hearing the life story of one of our volunteers who was born in Rwanda and actually lived to tell about it. So, I guess I will just begin and hopefully not ramble too much.

The good: Kai's birthday! It was amazing and beautiful just as we had seen on television. We took an unguided mountain bike safari through the vast savannahs and straight "out of Africa" Fever Trees (literally and figuratively :)) We saw hippos and heard them gnashing and fighting viciously, saw giraffe, gazelle, zebra, warthog, impala, baboon, ostrich, various monkeys, bush cats and heard even more. While we will be taking an official safari soon to see the big predators we decided that hearing the sounds of fighting baboon troops, feeling the rumble of the ground as 50 spooked impalas bound across the road in front of our bikes, and smelling the dust from the skittish wart hogs as they pretended to challenge us if we got too close was by far the thrill of nature we were hoping for. Beyond that, we stayed in a beautiful spot full of avacodo trees that the monkeys preferred to raid and dined at an open air restaurant each night looking over the lake. It felt like a true "vacation" by anyone's standards.

The bad: While it would be easy and comforting to talk only about the amazing children(which they are), the beautiful scenery, and the loads of amazing development projects we are hoping will make an impact on this impoverished area it would be a disservice to those who really want to help and learn about this experience. Devin and I had arrived home mid afternoon from our trip when we heard screaming coming from the girls dorm area. Devin walked in to find one of our female workers beating--not spanking--beating the SHIT out of one of our girls with a large, heavy stick. He stopped the beating and got into an argument with a female staff member who said that she was allowed to "cane" the girls and was not going to stop. To give perspective, but not that the reason REMOTELY matters, the girl had placed her school uniform sweater in her backpack rather than carrying it home in her arms as instructed. We called our boss in Nairobi and informed him since only he has the power to fire staff and he said he would come this morning and "take care of it once and for all" since this was not the first time we had reported but the first time we had witnessed it ourselves. We had scheduled an all staff/volunteer meeting for that night at 8:30 p.m. to discuss this issue as well as other logistics when we heard another girl screaming from the dorm. This time the female staff was beating a different girl. I walked straight in to an older girl who I knew would tell me the truth and asked what happened. She said that "autie dona was beating her". This was confirmed again to me by a second girl. When the femal staff was confronted she yelled in Kikuyu at the 2 girls who had told me the truth and made them come to the door. Knowing that I didn't know what she had said to the girls she smirked and smiled and made flippent comments in Kikuyu as both girls retracted their stories to me. As they talked, they both looked at me with desperate, sad eyes knowing that I knew they were lying to me. What they didn't know is that I understood and my heart was actually breaking for them because they were threatened to stand there and lie to me out of fear or risk being beaten themselves later. I stopped them short of their retraction, put my hands on them, gave a wink that the female staff member couldn't see and told them I would keep them safe, it would be ok, and that they could trust me. This last sentence, the promise I made to them, has tortured me all night and day. If I am not supported by our executive director in this matter then we are left with the decision of staying in a reactive state of response stopping beatings as we hear the screaming?!? We talked today of threatening to remove our leadership from the orphanage if the staff member is not fired as we cannot stay and support a practice that further diminishes the small bit of dignitiy that these girls have left. But really what does this accomplish? In principle, a lot, but in reality here in this small corner of nowhere...not much. What it would do for sure is leave these girls alone with no one to hear them scream and no one to make it stop. Is that a success? A success because a decision is made on principle? Is it a failure if we stay and can't stop it? These are all questions I have been asking myself since last night and throughout today. As it would happen (TIA), the morning meeting with our director to "solve the problem" has still not happened and it is 7:00p.m. so I have no idea how this will be resolved. My concern, simplified, is that I have 15 girls (our 9 boys and male staff are terrific), depending on my word, and if I dont' have my word what do I have left? How can I look at Damaris, who only survived the Rift Valley massacre because, in her words.."God wanted her to" as whe watched her entire family be slain, beheaded, and disrepected-moving their heads to wrong gendered bodies and "tricking her" into thinking it was her family-live one more second where she is beaten and disrespected? As I mentioned in the beginning I have a lot to write but feel pretty worn out now and am going to have to wait until later to write the rest. Love to all.